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Re:Tesla Model 3 Hits Production by Munkum on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @07:42AM (#14701579)
No, this is not a good plan at all, it's incredibly risky.

To get the car all road legal it needs to be crash tested - that is usually what the pre-volume builds are used for. If they fail (and they sometimes do, because you can't do a finite element analysis on an assembly as complex as a car in the variety of scenarios that you would crash test it) then you need to reengineer the car. This usually means panel gauge increases, sometimes it means additional reinforcement parts (boron steel inserts and brackets a lot of the time). If that happens the production could be delayed by months as they'd need to find a way to feed those parts to the line and modify any tooling that might be effected.

Re:Tesla Model 3 Hits Production by brianwawok on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @08:15AM (#14701747)
So these all sound like very true and good things. No reason to doubt there is a reason current big auto does it the way they do.

On the other hand, Musk hasn't been one to just say stuff and totally fail. By and large he is getting what he says he is getting, and on a close to reasonable time frame. If we stuck to what big auto said, there would be no autopilot, and EVs would still be a toy with a tiny range.

I have at this point little reason to doubt that they will pull this off.

Clearly making cars is a solved problem, millions are made every year. It SEEMS like Musk hires people that know their stuff.

So I am going long on Tesla, and short on existing big auto. Time will tell what happens ;)

Re:Tesla Model 3 Hits Production by baq on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @08:46AM (#14701930)
> and on a close to reasonable time frame

woah, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. when elon says years, it's martian years as the meme goes, and not without reason. he's getting a better at estimation but is still an extreme optimist.

Re:Tesla Model 3 Hits Production by sqeaky on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @11:49AM (#14703389)
But Musk's numbers are much lower than everyone else's and he usually some percentage late, Not decades. Sometimes he is even on time.

He does things that many claim are literally impossible, who cares if they come 10% later and that is 3 months. If Telsa hits the production numbers by June they are still doing something that GM and Ford once said was decades in the future.

Re:Tesla Model 3 Hits Production by brianwawok on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @12:49PM (#14704012)
This is where I am too, I could see him aiming for 500k cars in 2018 and only shipping 425k due to some shortage. I could not see it taking until 2022 for him to get to the 500k mark.
Re:Tesla Model 3 Hits Production by greglindahl on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @12:43PM (#14703949)
Elon tweeted a couple of days ago that Model 3 had all needed regulatory approvals, so I guess it passed the crash test. I can believe that you know a lot about building cars, but you don't seem to have any actual information about what's going on inside Tesla's Fremont factory.
Re:Tesla Model 3 Hits Production by chc on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @09:37AM (#14702261)
Aren't we already past that point, though? This seems a bit like worrying that the horses might bolt today because the barn door was left open yesterday.
Re:Tesla Model 3 Hits Production by csours on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @03:32PM (#14705452)
Yes, and that's the scary thing.